I was goofing off with any headwear I could find for the Headwear challenge, found these black cat ears in the bottom of a storage chest while looking for my Disney mouse ears (which I never did find). Used a very different hat and processing technique for Headwear, but liked this one a lot for Black & White - which is just as well since the weather kept me from shooting what I had initially planned.
Convert from RAW
Desaturate to b/w
Duplicate Layer, Multiply, 25
Duplicate Layer, Luminosity, 87
Duplicate Layer, Soft Light, 100
Duplicate Layer, Screen, 63
Duplicate Layer, Difference, 5
Adj. Layers: Levels, Brightness/Contrast
Dodged irises, eye whites, part of the shadowed cheek, shadow around upper right ear
Burned some gray tones, pupils, eyelashes
Neat Image
Cloned stray hair, skin flaws, hot pixels
Duplicate Layer, Normal, USM, eraser on oversharpened hair
Copy eyes to new layer, Luminosity, 73, USM
Flatten Image, Resize, Save for Web
Statistics
Place: 231 out of 424 Avg (all users): 5.4110 Avg (commenters): 6.2500 Avg (participants): 5.3107 Avg (non-participants): 5.5833 Views since voting: 1049 Views during voting: 261 Votes: 163 Comments: 7 Favorites: 1 (view)
This is such a cool shot.
I find it hard to put into words why, but the position of your eyes
makes this shot tell a story of sorts, makes one wonder what you
are wondering about, oh heck, I told you I probably can't put it into words...
Technical: Focus and depth of field are excellent. Brightness and contrast: The top of the hand and parts of the forehead are blown out, but the high contrast and the lighting angle helps to make the whole thing still work, as the areas are small and the rest of the shapes give the appearance of detail where there is none.
Reaction: I like the work around the eyes. The dodging really made the eyes stand out. I'm going to have to go with kiwiness on the hand. It distracts from the face, and with the high contrast and lighting, it almost looks photoshopped in, or like it was someone other than the subject.
Overall I like the picture, reducing the attention to the hand, (lowering it to allow more of the face to be seen, or holding it further back), I believe would help here. Nice work.
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